Tour de France 2007 thread (2 Viewers)

Pidcock is insanely good alright. I didn't think he'd transition out of Cross this fast.

I dunno... does everyone just presume he's doping?

I don't :-/
 
Yeah. I guess it's hard to justify why you might think anyone might be clean.

Presumed guilty, until proven innocent. And it's impossible to prove any of them are not dopers.

Dunno.

I'm sorry you can't dream big and I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles.
 
Froome 106th today in Alps /Trentino 14 minutes down.
good stuff by Dan today but I'm disappointed he isn't riding La Fleche tomorrow. the Israelites will be led by Moses / Mike Woods. they also sent Ben Hermans who is very useful in the Ardennes to Italy for some reason.

Tour of The Alps / Trentino is a fave stage race of mine but it's on at the same week as my FAVOURITE races.

I've been aware of Pidcock since he was a multi Junior World Champ. Interesting that like Mathieu VdP and Wout VA he came up through cyclocross. Pidcock has an even wider range of skills than van Aert
- he seems to be outstanding at everything.
I am only an armchair cycling fan but it looks strange to me that someone Pidcock's size has such a fast sprint ??

in the 90's and 2000's the path for young riders was starkly different from now:
riders turned pro aged 21 or 22 after usually two years an amateur (maybe even three).
in their debut season they mostly rode smaller races (e.g. Coupe de France one day races and the likes of the Route de Sud or Tour de Limousin or Tour of Ireland).
if they had adapted well they would get a bigger race programme in their second season and maybe start their debut Grand Tour.

it has been widely said by ex pros that 90's teams would expect neo pros to ride clean get an idea
what their baseline level was and would not be happy if the found they had signed a doper.
but after a rider inevitably struggled through his debut year they would then introduce him to doping.

now lads only do one year at under 23 level, go pro aged 20, get thrown into big races straight away,
often kick arse getting results immediately and ride a GT in their first season (way too much too soon for
a 20 or 21 year old in my opinion).

I remember Lance getting beaten at the Amstel by Dutch riders twice, both in two up sprints
Boogerd beat him in 1999 and Erik Dekker a few years later.

Boogerd couldn't sprint (or TT) so it was a huge surprise he narrowly outsprinted Lance - even in April 1999 I didn't like Lance and I was delighted.
it was the only classic Boogie ever won won - he was second in NINE classics and third in a few more.

Women's Fleche Wallonne is also live tomorrow morning on Eurosport.
 
Yeah. I guess it's hard to justify why you might think anyone might be clean.

Presumed guilty, until proven innocent. And it's impossible to prove any of them are not dopers.

Dunno.

I'm sorry you can't dream big and I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles.
I mean I reckon as soon as you hear 'Team Sky' then you automatically assume "So doper then"
 
@nuke terrorist
how about this for a partial explanation:

young riders always had the potential to be good, but they were treated like shiiiiiiiiiiii <breath> hiiiiiiiiit for their first few years until they learned the ropes and so on.

It was the expectation that they were going to struggle that played a huge part in them struggling. There was this trial by fire, earning your place, being a triple hard bastard, sitting in the wind, sleeping on the shit bed, being your own mechanic, and so on, plus the newness, that ensured they were always under the hammer in their early years.

And, even then, occasionally a rider like LeMond would come over and immediately ride very very well.

Like, it clearly looks like nothing we've seen before, but it might just have been because of the shit capers they used to put the neo pros through. Old thinking basically.

But yeah, it's really confusing. I've been thinking it over since last year and the above is the best I've come up with.

I mean, yeah, there's always the blanket "because doping"... who knows.
 
I don't follow cycling anything like as closely as I did from say 1997-2000's so your guess is probably a lot better than mine.

[EDIT: Kimmage rode the Tour in his debut season but in the 90's it seems teams were very into slowly developing new pros. Dave Millar turned pro aged 20 in 1997 but only started a GT in 2000. see Moncoutie below]

when Oscar Freire won the World Championship in 1999 as second year pro he was making 9,000 pounds p.a. at Vitalicio Seguros according to the contemporary UK cycling press.
he then signed a 1.2 million 3 year contract with Mapei.

my favourite rider ever David Moncoutie would have turned pro with Lance at Cofidis in 1997 but dodged a bullet when Lance got sick. he got no results in some dark days of cycling and at the end of 1998 was facing
going home to work in his family business a village post office.
the team owner Francois Migraine insisted he was given a new contract.
David won a stage in the '99 Dauphine and went on to be a yardstick for what a rider could honestly do in
the 2000's.

another thing we have been warned about since about 2003 was gene therapy being abused.
the idea back then was that it wasn't far off but I have no idea what developments have happened since,
it isn't something I hear anything about now.

anyone ever hear from IFF these days ? he posted on cycling a lot here over the years.
 
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I never heard of of 80'-90's cyclist Monica Bandini (1964 - 19 April 2021) who died of a heart attack the other day.

Monica Bandini (procyclingstats.com)

Ironically one of her best wins was the 1998 Giro del Trentino. She had several top ten finishes in the women's Tour and Giro.
Monica was a World Champ in the 50 km TT in 1988 - the four woman TT which the Italian's took very seriously.
 
@nuke terrorist
how about this for a partial explanation:

young riders always had the potential to be good, but they were treated like shiiiiiiiiiiii <breath> hiiiiiiiiit for their first few years until they learned the ropes and so on.

It was the expectation that they were going to struggle that played a huge part in them struggling. There was this trial by fire, earning your place, being a triple hard bastard, sitting in the wind, sleeping on the shit bed, being your own mechanic, and so on, plus the newness, that ensured they were always under the hammer in their early years.

And, even then, occasionally a rider like LeMond would come over and immediately ride very very well.

Like, it clearly looks like nothing we've seen before, but it might just have been because of the shit capers they used to put the neo pros through. Old thinking basically.

But yeah, it's really confusing. I've been thinking it over since last year and the above is the best I've come up with.

I mean, yeah, there's always the blanket "because doping"... who knows.
the exception on the young riders stuff being Mark Scanlon. What a pure raw talent he was as a kid. Clearly the best cyclist in the world in his category. He frequently handed Bradley Wiggins hole to him in races, and he was snapped up by a pro team (Ag2R).

Then, curiously enough, this superb talent couldn't even compete with average riders in the pro ranks. Why? Because he refused to juice. He got disillusioned with the sport and walked away.

Scanlon's name used to be used when people justified the fight against doping. It seems to have been forgotten now, which is a real shame.

As far as I know he took up surfing in Sligo, and opened a surf rental place in one of the popular surfing areas. I'd say he's a lot happier out doing that then during the misery of trying to compete against less-talented, doped up cyclists.

He did a few local open races a few years ago, but clearly the love for the sport, was well as the fitness, was gone.

He was a real hero to me and some of the lads I cycled with 10-15 years ago. And he was a large reason why pro cycling became toxic to us back then.
 
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As far as I know he took up surfing in Sligo, and opened a surf rental place in one of the popular surfing areas.
Yeah. I remember Mark.

I never rode with him normally. Maybe raced in the same races, don't know. I think he was racing in the Pheonix Park at one point.

I didn't know what happened to him. Good to hear he's doing alright... he'd be almost certainly better off out of that than in. Even the successful guys from then regularly ended up in bits. It would be nice to turn up in a shop and see him, and tell him I'd be hanging around the back waiting for races to start, looking at him and knowing I was making up the numbers. Heh.

I have a vague memory of him having chats and laughing in a blue(?) kit with those cool knee warmers that sort of extended half way down your calf. Pro AF.
 
yeah Mark Scanlon was 4 real.
the first time I heard of Mark was when he beat Wiggo at Junior Tour of Ireland in 1998.
actually Wiggins only finished 3rd.
when Mark retired he did make a comment about doping making it not worth his while continuing.

glad to hear he's doing well back in Sligo. I watched nearly every race he did on Eurosport. I remember once he was injured and when the Ras was on he showed up in Nenagh as as a guest of the race.

sometimes I mistakenly call Sam Bennett 'Mark' as they are the most similar Irish cycling greats.
at the time he was huge in my life because post Kelly and pre Nico and Deignan, only and Mark and briefly Ciaran Power were the only Irish lads to get to elite level.
when Mark was part of the lead out train for Kirsipuu when he won stage 2 of the 2004 Tour I buzzing - more excited than anything that happened in Irish cycling recently.
the best Irish riders of my generation (born 70's) were Power and David McCann.

Fleche Wallonne:
the UAE team didn't start the Fleche Wallonne today as Diego Ullissi and a staff member were positive for Covid.
both Ulissi and the staff member had been vaccinated worryingly.
the have an immense team so no Hirschi, Pogacar, Formolo today.


in the women's race the climb with 10 km to go (which I think used to be a descent at the same point in the race)
was quite long and hard and made a big difference.
 
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have to laugh at teams falling foul of covid testing, but they are experts at 'passing' dope tests.
I keep laughing at how Russia have been kicked out of athletics for 'systematic doping', but if you just look up the medal table from the last Olympics, the Americans won basically 3 times as many medals as them. So the Russians are 'systematically doping', but the Americans and Brits keep beating them in events. Yeah, good one lads.
 
I keep laughing at how Russia have been kicked out of athletics for 'systematic doping', but if you just look up the medal table from the last Olympics, the Americans won basically 3 times as many medals as them. So the Russians are 'systematically doping', but the Americans and Brits keep beating them in events. Yeah, good one lads.
we got Fancy Bears out of it though that has been very entertaining.
 
at 59.1 km to go in Fleche Wallonne today Jakob Fuglsang was filmed live on TV taking a piss while on his bike.

amazingly I'd never seen this happen in a race before despite it being common practice
 
at 59.1 km to go in Fleche Wallonne today Jakob Fuglsang was filmed live on TV taking a piss while on his bike.

amazingly I'd never seen this happen in a race before despite it being common practice
surprised he still had to go that close to the end. That could be why it was caught on telly. Theres a kind of 'unwritten' rule that the cameras won't film when they go for a slash. You often see cyclists pulling off to the side in a quiet spot, and usually when one pulls over, a load will go with him, so they can all empty the bladders, and ride together to catch up. But I reckon that would be all out of the way before they reach 100km to go. The camera people probably weren't expecting it, hence wrongly filming him.

Thats only a guess. I didn't see any of the race today.
 
surprised he still had to go that close to the end. That could be why it was caught on telly. Theres a kind of 'unwritten' rule that the cameras won't film when they go for a slash. You often see cyclists pulling off to the side in a quiet spot, and usually when one pulls over, a load will go with him, so they can all empty the bladders, and ride together to catch up. But I reckon that would be all out of the way before they reach 100km to go. The camera people probably weren't expecting it, hence wrongly filming him.

Thats only a guess. I didn't see any of the race today.
Jakob was filmed by the TV moto at back of the peloton. he dropped back so no one else would get a shower
and he could keep cycling.
the started stretching and getting out of the saddle of his moving bike and big jet of piss was produced.
he was facing away from the camera following him and probably didn't notice the camera.
absolutely no harm done, no penis on camera.
- there is proud tradition of pissing on the move so it happens often.

EDIT: actually not a pee story but I just remembered poor Tom Dumoulin in the Giro a few years ago
 

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